Fedora 12 has been released today. "I'm proud to announce the release of Fedora 12, the latest innovative Linux distribution from the Fedora Project, a global, collaborative partnership of free software community members sponsored by Red Hat."

It has nothing to do with speed of updates, so much as the entire rpm system. At the time I switched, Apt had much better dependency tracking, and the Debian repositories kick ass, the system just worked better.

It has nothing to do with speed of updates, so much as the entire rpm system. At the time I switched, Apt had much better dependency tracking, and the Debian repositories kick ass, the system just worked better.

In my experience, there is nothing wrong with dependency tracking in rpm. If you use malformed packages or repos with incompatible dependencies things go wrong but that would happen in the deb world as well. To most people this is a no issue if you stick with well known reposositories, and that is the case regardless if you use yum or apt.

A much bigger problem that we have two dominant non compatible packaging systems. This means that developer effort to package a certain package doubles. This means that the developer is likely to have less time available to test that his package works well on the target system.

It also means that the developer needs time to learn both systems. In the end this means that many programs only gets packaged for one of the packaging systems, resulting in less available software for the end user, and a lesser customer base for the software manufacturer.

Lesser customer base often means less profit. Less profit means that it is less likely that the package gets ported to Linux in the first place, and again the loser is the Linux end user.

Today you need to be able to install rpm to support Linux Standards Base. Debian complies with this by using Alien. However Alien is far too difficult to use to most end users, so if you are software house you still need to create both debian and rpms to support both Red Hat and Debian. In my opinion Debian does the Linux world a disservice in not adopting the standard packaging format.

If Debian switched to rpm as packagin format, their repositories would still kick ass, as they are done by very brilliant people, and they could still use apt-get and other tools that their users know and like, but the job for developers that would like to support both Debian and Red Hat would be much easier.

In the end that would result in a better business proposition for people considering porting their apps to Linux, and in the end this would be a good thing for the Linux user in general, regardless if he use Debian or some Red Hat based distro.